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Broadcast every year since 1956,
the Eurovision Song Contest is the
longest-running television show in Europe and one of
the longest in the world. It is also the world most-watched non-sporting event.
In 2014 it reached an audience of about 200 million
in Europe (1 billion worldwide) and was broadcast live to countries such as Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, India,
Korea, New Zealand and the USA even though
these countries do not participate.
Since the year 2000, the Contest has also been
broadcast over the Internet.

The idea of a song contest was first conceived in a
meeting in Monaco in January 1955. There the EBU
committee was searching for a way to bring together
its members around a light entertainment TV show.
Inspired by the success of the Sanremo Music
Festival in Italy they thought of a competition that
would be simultaneously broadcast to all the member
countries. Satellite television did not exist in
those days and the European Television Network was
just a terrestrial one so, in many ways, the contest
was thought of as little more than a technological
experiment in live television broadcasting.

The concept, the rules and the dates of what would
be later named as the "Eurovision Grand Prix" were
approved that same year in an assembly held in Rome
on 19 October 1955.

That "little" experiment has
grown over the years into a show of unbelievable proportions.
And the scale and popularity of it is such that the
word "Eurovision" itself is now mainly associated
with the contest by many people. Furthermore, it is
probably one of the most -if not the most- familiar
word across the continent.

Although the "Euro" in
its name can be misleading, being in Europe is not
required to take part in, let alone to be a part of
the European Union. Instead, being an active member
of the European Broadcasting Union is. So, what does
it take to be an active member of the EBU? You might
be asking yourself. Well, to join in a country must
be within the European Broadcasting Area or be a
part of the Council of Europe. The European
Broadcasting Area comprises a quite huge region of
the world which boundaries are: meridian 10º West of
Greenwich, meridian 40º east of Greenwich and
parallel 30º North. Just to give you an idea how big
it is, that includes Saudi Arabia and all of the
Mediterranean countries as well as Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iraq, Jordan, Syria and
Ukraine.

The EBU is the world's
largest alliance of public service media and it has
73 active members. So far, 53 out of them
have entered the contest at least once, including
Morocco which did in 1980. Tunez wanted to
participate in 1977 but in the end they withdrew for
unknown reasons never to try again.

Countries outside the European Broadcasting Area
cannot be active members but they can still join the
EBU as associated members in which case they cannot
participate in the Eurovision Song Contest even
though in many of them the show is followed by a
large audience. There are 32 associated countries so
far. India, Japan, New Zealand or Canada are among
them. But there is one where the Eurovision Song
Contest is followed with unmatched passion:
Australia. Probably because of Australia's strong political, historical
and cultural ties to Europe the show has been
broadcast there for more than 30 years with an
audience of about 3 million. In recognition of
Eurovision's popularity there, Australia was invited
to participate in the 60th edition of the contest to
be held in 2015 in Vienna. They will be the first
non EBU member ever to have entered the Eurovision
Song Contest. They have been given a wild card and
will go straight to the final. It is meant to be a one-off event
though, and only if the win would they be allowed to return for
the 2016's edition -but not to hold the show in
Australia in any case-

The main goal of this
site is to bring together all the winning
entries since 1956 when the contest
was mainly a radio program along with a resume of the
main facts, anecdotes, gossip etc. about each year's edition.
Here you can watch all the videos of the
Eurovision Song Contest winning entries year by year,
live from stage. You will listen to the songs exactly
the way they
were performed on stage the day they won. No studio
recordings here!The quality of the first
years' videos is very poor, as you might expect, but they are
true gems and worth watching to fully understand all
the changes the contest has gone through.